The day after a tornado tore the roof off the historic Nashville recording studio owned by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Jack White dropped by for a welfare check.
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Rawlings and the White Stripes founder - a fellow Nashville habitue - scaled the building, perched themselves on top of what was left, and surveyed the wreckage left by the twister.
"Being a can-do type of guy, he managed to get through the police barricades," Welch tells AAP.
"He just showed up and pitched in to help. It was such a mess, such a hard time."
Welch and Rawlings make music for hard times.
Late in 2024, the duo released their seventh album, Woodland, named after the studio all but wrecked by the tornado in that fateful year, 2020.
Woodland, established in 1967, had been the site of historic recordings by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Jimmy Buffett, Neil Young, Tammy Wynette and other luminaries before its purchase by Welch and Rawlings in 2001.
The singer-songwriters - having carved out their own unique niche in folk and country music over a celebrated career spanning nearly 30 years - went to painstaking, costly lengths to restore it to its former glory.
It was true to form.
The pair are known for songs of struggle and endurance: the tiny flower that signals the coming of spring after a harsh winter; the songwriter who refuses to work for free in the age of streaming.
Usually, they let a little light in.
"I like to think that our narratives have a perseverance in them," Welch says.
"I always feel like the people in our songs are going to make it through."
Welch and Rawlings made it through.
Woodland won them a Grammy for best folk album in 2025, after an Australian tour that included sold-out residencies at the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne's Hamer Hall.
Barely a year later, they're back - and this time, they're road-tripping, extending their run from the southeast capitals to regional centres including Toowoomba, Newcastle and Korumburra (pop. 4749).
It's their preferred mode of touring, even though Welch says it's usually unproductive from a writing point of view, describing it as an observational period of "gathering" raw material.
The gathering can take a long time.
Eight years separated their fourth record, Soul Journey, from their fifth, The Harrow and the Harvest - its title an allusion to their drawn-out writing process.
Woodland, the next album of all-original songs, was an even longer 13 years in the making (an album of country standards, All The Good Times, was released in 2020, along with a box set of "lost" songs, Boots).
Welch speaks of "an invisible bar" that a song has to clear to make the grade.
For Rawlings, it's "a little tickle that I get, that feeling I get in my stomach of nervousness when a song makes me feel a particular way".
Sometimes, he wishes they weren't so hard on themselves.
"Nothing would make me happier than to play a song that we didn't feel that good about and to have the audience go wild and for it to be our biggest hit," he says.
"Then at that point we could maybe loosen the reins, because then you think, well, I don't know what I'm talking about."
Boots, intended to clear a backlog of material, ended up justifying their unerring quality control.
It's a sweet collection, Rawlings says, before drily noting that audiences don't exactly clamour for those songs, either.
The covers album, All The Good Times, saw a change, with both Welch's and Rawlings' names appearing as a duo for the first time: previously, all their albums had appeared under Welch's name alone.
It was a risk - solo artists are considered easier to market - but to Welch's relief, "nobody got mad".
"It was really heartening to have the world understand and not even blink, and in fact, give us a Grammy."
In reality, the two had always been a partnership, singing harmonies so close their voices were barely distinguishable from one another.
On Woodland, Rawlings is singing lead more often.
The change of approach may have helped break the writing shackles but Welch says that mainly it just felt like the right thing to do: "I felt a sense of relief and appropriateness to finally put both of our names on the record."
There is also a little more instrumentation.
A duo, Rawlings says, is the hardest number for musicians to work with.
"A solo performer becomes this kind of organic thing and you will accept anything," he says.
"As soon as a second element is added, you don't really get the power that you get with more people but you get changed perceptions and more limitations."
Has he ever asked Jack White - who worked as a duo with Meg White in the White Stripes, similarly trying to extract the maximum amount from a minimalist framework - about this?
"I haven't talked music that much with Jack," Rawlings says.
"I've hung out with him some but I imagine he would be very much in tune with those feelings and those special straitjackets we put ourselves in."